Solar Tornadoes go into season on the sun

The weather in space could have a real adverse effect on the Earth, and since it’s tornado season on the sun, we should be on the lookout.

That’s what NASA chief Charles Bolden said late last week when addressing members of the Space Weather industry forum.

“This conference shines a spotlight on another naturally occurring phenomenon that can be just as punishing as a tornado — space weather,” Space.com reported him saying.

Solar weather can get so bad that it can take out satellites, cause black-outs and even — in the event of a powerful solar storm directed at the Earth — expose humans to harmful radiation, much like getting days worth of sunbathing all at once.

Bolden’s warning comes as a series of solar filaments race across the sun, filaments that have been explained by some as “solar tornadoes.”

Magnetic tornadoes on the sun’s surface are a very strange phenomonon. They actually get hotter the further they are from the sun.

“One would expect that the atmosphere of the Sun should become cooler with increasing distance from its surface. Remarkably, the opposite occurs and the temperature rises to over a million degrees,” a 2012 article from Nature explains.

These solar storms are sort of like tornadoes on Earth, but not exactly.

“In both cases, particles are forced into spirals. The resulting funnel is narrow at the bottom and widens with height in the atmosphere. On the other hand, the physical processes behind the formation of the tornadoes are very different. Tornadoes on the Earth occur in connection with rotating thunderstorms (or supercells) as a result of temperature and gas pressure differences and strong shear winds. The solar tornadoes are generated by rotating magnetic field structures, which force the plasma, i.e. the ionized gas, to move in spirals.” Sven Wedemeyer-Böhm said in the Nature article.

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Bolden said that it’s important for NASA to continue to learn more about space weather, as it could end up being important to protecting the U.S. and the world from possible adverse effects.

“Given the growing importance of space to our nation’s economic well being and security, it is of increasing importance that NASA and its partner agencies continue to advance our nation’s capability to understand and predict space weather events,” he explained to Space.com. “Space weather is a problem that crosses all borders and demands input from our international counterparts.”